Identidades in English No 1, February 2014 | Page 61

What Do We Need To
Transition to Democracy in Cuba?

Democracy and its challenges

Nilo Julián Gonzales Preval
Visual Artist. Poet. Cultural Promoter
Founder member ACETATO Producciones
Havana, Cuba

C

uba is a country full of gossipers. Gossip is
what in more elegant terms we’d call rumor,
word of mouth, suspicion, intuition, and in
some cases, opinion. An old rumor from my own
neighborhood is what they secretly call me when I
walk by the 324 balconies between the bus stop and
the entrance to the building where I live. Yet, this is
my neighborhood.. The people in my building are con-

vinced of my insanity and each one of them has his or
her own reasons to call me “El Loco,” some more or
less affectionately, more or less out of worry, and in
some cases, with pity. I feel that this, above all, is an
expression of their regard, but also know that part of
the reason for that nickname is due to my constant
habit of looking at clouds, which I see in all their
splendor because there is no other building full of tenants with nicknames like mine, applicable or not, to
block my view.
I really love to look at clouds. I love to look at them
because between them I see planes going to or coming
from Europe fly by. On many of those planes, Cuban
friends and strangers come, go and, in some cases,
never return. These are folks who support the work on

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behalf of civil society that many of us do. These
friends sometimes come with good intentions and
adapt to the reality of our social conditions. Other
times, those friends try to impose their ideas, and those
projects fail, despite all their human and financial capital.
The Cuban government’s migratory reforms have unleashed a market for the kind of politically and financially motivated travel called for by all those presentations at foundations and government bodies around
the world. That stampede of Cuban political actors on
the international scene has made me take a look at my
neighborhood from the vantage point of my balcony
and remember something. That when a Cuban or foreigner approaches my most immediate community,
e.g., my building, with any sort of plan for promoting
democratic changes in Cuba’s leadership, I feel hungry, hungry in real and practical terms. Yet, it is not
the kind of hunger that comes from anxiety over underdevelopment when facing the West’s great markets, or just for a glass of milk and bread with cheese
(I have to save money for months to be able to eat a
decent piece of cheese, and I know there are children
I see from my balcony who have not eaten cheese or
some other common food items for the last 50 years).
Thus, this person comes with a plan in which I, with
my hunger and myriad problems regarding housing,
transportation and communication, have to abandon
my anthropological values, which are like my nourishment, to begin to understand political values, something that in Cuba’s case have existed for fewer than
300 years.